Friday, 28 November 2014

Life after Marikana

First the facts. In
August 2012, a group of Rock Drill Operators, dissatisfied with their wages,
and with the representation available from either of the labour unions with a
presence at the Lonmin Marikana Shaft, embarked upon an unprotected strike to push
Lonmin for higher wages. The strike, and its attendant protest, soon gained
widespread support, and incited a violent response – both from union officials
and the police. In the days before 16 August 2012, the striking miners, union
officials, Lonmin security guards, and the police themselves, all took a small
number of casualties. The striking miners – about 3,000 of them – retreated to
the top of a small rocky outcrop just outside the Lonmin shaft compound. There
they stayed for four days, demanding that Lonmin management come and address
them on their demands.

The official response was
marked by panic and incomprehension. Documents disclosed before the Commission
show that communications between government officials, Ministers and senior
Lonmin executives were remarkably ill-informed. The accepted wisdom was that
the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) – the minority
union at the time – was behind the strike, and that only AMCU could stop it. We
now know that this was not true, although it should have been obvious at the
time. When Joseph Matunjwa - AMCU’s
President – attempted, at the request of the police, to convince the striking
miners to disperse, they simply repeated the demand that they had made all
along, that Lonmin come and address them directly.

Lonmin did not come.
Instead, the police moved to what they called the “tactical phase” of their
operations. They encircled the outcrop with barbed wire, and made to disperse
the crowd and arrest the striking miners. As they did so, a group of the miners
started to descend the hill, moving toward the Nkaneng informal settlement a
few hundred metres away. Travelling slowly at first, they sped up, and raised
blankets over their heads, as they were met with teargas and rubber bullets fired
to their left flank and to the rear. What happened then was televised the world
over. Driven towards the police line, the miners ran around a kraal in order to
disperse into Nkaneng through a small gap in the police line. As they
approached, the police opened fire. This was Scene 1. Seventeen of the miners
were killed there. Other miners ran away, and sheltered behind a small
collection of boulders a couple of hundred metres away. The police gave chase
and fired into, and from the top of, the boulders. Another seventeen miners
were killed. At the Commission, this is known as Scene 2.

The police claim that
they fired in self-defence at Scene 1. They have never provided a clear or
complete explanation for their conduct at Scene 2. But few can reasonably doubt
that the killings were unlawful. Even if it is accepted that the police
genuinely thought that they were under attack at Scene 1 (it should not be),
their response – a storm of semi-automatic fire at head and chest height - was
grossly disproportionate. The killings at Scene 2 - mostly at close quarters,
of miners who circumstances suggest were trying to surrender – were without any
justification. The responsible officers should be prosecuted, as almost all of
the parties to the Commission urge.

These are the facts. But
what about the context in which they arose? I want to suggest that Marikana
poses five difficult questions about key features of our political order.

The first of these
questions is about corporatism. Corporatism, as a political system, relies on
institutional co-operation between the state, business and organised labour.
The lynchpin of corporatist politics is adequate representation. Individuals
and groups that are not organised, or whose forms of organisation lack official
recognition, are excluded from the corporatist pact.

In South Africa,
organised labour is the province of the formally employed. More than this,
however, organised labour has, over the 20 years since the end of Apartheid,
come to represent an ever more privileged segment of the labour force. South
African unemployment runs somewhere between 28% and 40%, depending on the
definition one adopts. Many more people work in casual employment, or in
un-unionised industries. Accordingly, the extent to which ordinary workers can
realistically be said to be represented in corporatist institutions has always
been limited, and is diminishing. At Lonmin, the strikers, were not, of course,
wholly without union representation. Many were members of the National Union of
Mineworkers (NUM), whose status as the “majority” union at Lonmin gave it
privileged negotiating rights. Some had joined AMCU, which had far fewer such
rights. Others had no union membership at all.

However, it was the
strikers’ election to press their claims outside the unions that was
significant. It turned what might have been an unremarkable labour dispute,
perhaps easily resolved, into a far wider conflict about the nature of the
industrial relations regime at Lonmin, the structures of representation it
relied on, and, by extension, the efficacy of post-Apartheid corporatist
arrangements. The state’s response was to side with Lonmin, and its alliance
partner NUM. It denounced the strike as “illegal” and deployed the police to
respond to what it openly characterised as a criminal act. This stance enabled
the build-up of heavily-armed security forces which was a necessary
precondition of the massacre.

All of this calls into
question both the efficacy and legitimacy of post-Apartheid corporatist
arrangements. If to reject these arrangements, and to seek to organise and
engage outside them, is to make oneself vulnerable to criminalisation and
police violence, then hard questions need to be asked about whether they are
morally acceptable, broadly consistent with political rights enshrined in the
Constitution, or politically efficacious.

A second problem is the
nature of political “participation”. Although often celebrated, without
qualification, as a political good, the emphasis on participatory democracy in
post-Apartheid politics and law has its limitations. To emphasise participation
is necessarily to discourage dissent against political institutions. To the
striking miners at Marikana, to participate in the existing structures of
collective bargaining and labour dispute resolution was to acquiesce in a
system in which they had lost faith. This rejection of “participation” took
them beyond the mechanisms through which their political agency could be
assimilated and dispersed, which is why Lonmin and the state were so threatened
by it.

“Participation”
presupposes an existing network of processes and institutions in which to
participate. This entails accepting a set of power relationships which can be
influenced, sometimes transformed, through participation, but will always tend
towards a particular set of interests – usually the interests of those who set
the system of participation up in the first place. Outside labour relations,
ward committees – local level statutorily recognised instruments of local
government – are often held up as the key mechanism of participation in the
decisions taken by local government – decisions about who gets public works
programme jobs, housing, access to water, sanitation and electricity, and who
has the right to stay in a particular informal settlement.

Attempts to organise
outside ward committees often meet with violent reprisals. Abahlali
baseMjondolo, a shack-dwellers’ movement based in Durban and Cape Town, has
found itself subjected to a progamme of political assassinations, police violence,
and violent eviction. At least two of the settlements in which it is active
have been renamed “Marikana”. Abahlali is the target of violence not simply
because it calls out the state’s abject failure to respond adequately to the
needs of people living in informal settlements, but because it does so outside
the processes and institutions of “participation”, and because it refuses to
allow those process and institutions to channel and dissipate its grievances.

It is therefore necessary
to ask whether post-Apartheid politics really permits extra-institutional
dissent at all. If it does not (and I would argue that Marikana reveals that
the costs of dissent are very high indeed), then the value of participation is itself
questionable, because participation is only meaningful if it is an active
choice to shape the terms of social and political engagement, rather than a
reluctant obeisance to the existing distribution of political power.

Third, there is
inequality. The fissures in our political system might not be so serious were
it not for South Africa’s worsening and deep-seated structural inequality.
Although absolute poverty has been reduced since 1994, inequality has
increased. In any case, about half of the population is living at or below the
poverty line.

At the core of inequality
is the state’s failure to imagine, much less implement, an economic alternative
that is capable of making any dent in inequality. As Hein Marais has argued, in
his path-breaking Limits To Change: The Political Economy of Transition, and as
Brazil, India, Korea and Indonesia have all shown, economic alternatives that
protect and grow labour-intensive secondary and tertiary industries are
possible. However, South Africa remains a model of economic orthodoxy – a low
growth, low inflation, high interest rate, high unemployment economy, which is
over-reliant on agriculture and extractive industry.

Beyond this, we must also
consider the increasing prominence of legal resolutions to political disputes.
The law is a powerful political resource. But reliance on juridical processes
will not in itself bring about the kind of transformation we need. Juridical
forms – like Commissions of Inquiry - have their uses. The construction of the
body of evidence generated by the Marikana Commission was clearly valuable.
Whatever its report ultimately says, many of the facts the Commission unearthed
speak for themselves. But the Commission had its limitations. Its habit of
approaching its task like a trial court saw it dawdle for over a year, made it
astonishingly expensive and provided few opportunities for the families of the
deceased to obtain the kind of victim-centered restorative justice the
Commission said it was aiming to provide.

Finally, there are important
lessons for civil society. Civil society organisations must recognise the
limits of their political role, lest, in claiming to speak “for” the poor,
rather than “with” them, they replicate the kind of “exclusion by
representation” felt by the miners who rejected their unions at Marikana.

Dissent, in the form of
political action initiated outside formal institutions by formations of the
poor themselves, is the most vital source of social transformation in
contemporary South Africa. Civil society must expand and protect the spaces in
which the poor can act for themselves – spaces like that so brutally shut down
at Marikana. Poor peoples’ movements do not need to be interpreted, represented
or mobilised by civil society organisations. They can do that on their own.
What they do need is strategic support to amplify their voices in a way that
disrupts the complacency which has settled over the post-Apartheid political
class. Marikana teaches us that to “represent” the poor; or to encourage them
to “participate” on terms other than those chosen for themselves, is often to
replicate the kind of political deficits that have led to their exclusion from
so many of the benefits of post-Apartheid constitutional democracy.

Marikana is a warning. If
South Africa continues along its current economic path, then dissent against,
rather than participation in, current political and social arrangements will
only become more frequent. If the response to that dissent is violent political
repression, then Marikana may not be the last we see of state-sponsored killing
at scale. Both our attitude to inequality, and our attitude to dissent, have to
change.

Frantz Fanon

1925 - 1961

This Blog

This blog contains resources directly related to Frantz Fanon's life and work, the secondary literature on Fanon and other resources useful for engaging Fanon's ideas here and now. Some of what is here comes from, or relates to, a particular set of ongoing discussions around Fanon's work in Grahamstown.